Posts
Earth
Surface During August of 2014 Was Hottest Ever Recorded
16
September, 2014
The
monthly global temperature records just keep falling…
Despite
no El Nino declared, an extraordinarily hot global ocean surface
keeps dumping heat back into the atmosphere. This transfer resulted
in the hottest March-through-May period in the global record and has
pushed numerous record spikes in the global measures this summer. By
August, according to NASA, the global average had again climbed to
never-before-seen levels.
As
of yesterday’s report, NASA showed that the Global Land-Ocean
Surface Temperature Index had climbed to 0.70 degrees Celsius above
the mid 20th Century average and about 0.95 degrees Celsius above the
1880s average. The previous record high for the period was set in
2011 at 0.69 degrees C above the global 1951 to 1980 average.
(Global surface temperature departures according to NASA GISS. Image source: NASA.)
Throughout
the world, global ocean surface temperatures showed extraordinary
departures above average for the month. Greater variance was
experienced over continental land masses and over the polar regions.
Zonal
anomalies showed far greater heat amplification near the southern
polar region, especially in the region near 80 south latitude. In the
Northern Hemisphere the tundra region near 60 north latitude focusing
in Northeast Siberia near the methane emitting zone of the East
Siberian Arctic Shelf, the region north of the Caspian Sea, and
Baffin Bay and Northeast Canada showed the greatest high temperature
anomalies. Only the high Arctic and regions in or near the southern
ocean showed widespread and significant cooler than average zonal
readings.
You
can see these zonal anomalies in the graph provided by NASA below:
(Temperature departures by latitudinal zone. Image source: NASA.)
A
Catastrophic Pace of Warming
To
understand these record high global temperatures, it is useful to
consider the broader paleo-climate context. In this context, the
global temperature difference between 1880 and the last ice age was
about 5 degrees Celsius. So the current temperature departure, driven
by human greenhouse gas emissions, is equal to about 1/5 the
difference between the 19th century and an ice age, but on the side
of hot.
As
it took about 12,000 years for the post ice-age warming to occur, the
recorded pace of warming since 1880 is about 20 times faster than
that period of extreme Earth system change. With the predicted pace
of warming expected to increase even further and with ice sheets
still covering the surface of the Earth (which greatly help to
mitigate the pace of warming spikes), this current velocity of change
is both likely unprecedented and catastrophic.
Links:
Methane
levels threaten to skyrocket
10
Setpember, 2014
The World Meteorological Organization’s annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin shows that between 1990 and 2013 there was a 34% increase in radiative forcing – the warming effect on our climate – because of long-lived greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide.
In 2013, concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 142% of the pre-industrial era (1750), and of methane and nitrous oxide 253% and 121% respectively.
The ocean cushions the increase in CO2 that would otherwise occur in the atmosphere, but with far-reaching impacts. The current rate of ocean acidification appears unprecedented at least over the last 300 million years, according to an analysis in the report.
“We know without any doubt that our climate is changing and our weather is becoming more extreme due to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels,” said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud.
“We know without any doubt that our climate is changing and our weather is becoming more extreme due to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels,” said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud.
NOAA data give a slightly lower CO2 growth figure for 2013, but even when extrapolating NOAA's data, some frightening trendlines appear, as illustrated by above image.
The WMO concludes that a reduction in RF (radiative forcing) from its current level (2.92 W·m–2 in 2013) will require huge cuts in a number of emissions, not just in CO2. In the figure on the right, the RF of the long-lived greenhouse gases (LLGHG) is plotted along with different emission reduction scenarios: (a) emissions held constant at 2013 levels, (b) constant CO2 emissions and 80% reduction in anthropogenic non-CO2 GHG emissions, (c) 80% reduction in CO2 emissions while non-CO2 GHG emissions are held constant, and (d) 80% reductions in all LLGHG emissions.
A recent study shows that the world not only continues to build new coal-fired power plants, but built more new coal plants in the past decade than in any previous decade. Worldwide, an average of 89 gigawatts per year (GW yr–1) of new coal generating capacity was added between 2010 and 2012, 23 GW yr–1 more than in the 2000–2009 time period and 56 GW yr–1 more than in the 1990–1999 time period. Natural gas plants show a similar pattern.
Assuming these plants operate for 40 years, the fossil-fuel burning plants built in 2012 will emit approximately 19 billion tons of CO2 (Gt CO2) over their lifetimes, versus 14 Gt CO2 actually emitted by all operating fossil fuel power plants in 2012.
The study concludes that total committed emissions related to the power sector are growing at a rate of about 4% per year.
“Bringing down carbon emissions means retiring more fossil fuel-burning facilities than we build,” said Steven Davis, assistant professor of Earth system science at UCI and the study’s lead author. “But worldwide, we’ve built more coal-burning power plants in the past decade than in any previous decade, and closures of old plants aren’t keeping pace with this expansion.”
“Far from solving the climate change problem, we’re investing heavily in technologies that make the problem worse,” he added.
“We’ve been hiding what’s going on from ourselves: A high-carbon future is being locked in by the world’s capital investments,” said Socolow, professor emeritus of mechanical & aerospace engineering.The IPCC in AR5 suggests there was a carbon budget to divide between nations (above image left), while largely ignoring potentially huge feedbacks such as albedo changes resulting from decline of snow and ice in the Arctic and methane eruptions from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean.
These two feedbacks alone could each soon cause more warming than the warming directly caused by people's emissions since the start of the industrial revolution.
Sam Carana says: “There is no carbon budget to divide between nations, instead there is just a huge debt of CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere and the oceans. Comprehensive and effective action must be taken to stop run-away warming.”
“This heat is now threatening to invade the Arctic Ocean and trigger huge temperature rises due to methane eruptions from the seafloor.”
“The heat is also melting Arctic sea ice from below, as the image below right shows, there now is hardly any sea ice left that is more than 3 meters (nearly 10 ft) thick.”
“Last year, this heat started to cause large methane eruptions from the Arctic Ocean's seafloor in early October, and this year temperatures in the Arctic Ocean are even higher.”Meanwhile, mean global methane levels of 1839 ppb were recorded at several altitudes by the MetOp-1 satellite on the morning of September 7, 2014.
And ocean heat continues to invade the Arctic, as illustrated by the NOAA image below.
References
- Record Greenhouse Gas Levels Impact Atmosphere and Oceans - WMO Press Release No. 1002
https://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/pr_1002_en.html
- WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin No. 10 | 9 September 2014
https://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/documents/1002_GHG_Bulletin.pdf
- NOAA Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, Annual Mean Global CO2 Growth Rates
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/global.html#global_growth
- Commitment accounting of CO2 emissions, by Steven J Davis and Robert H Socolow
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/9/8/084018
- Existing power plants will spew 300 billion more tons of carbon dioxide during use - News Release
http://news.uci.edu/press-releases/existing-power-plants-will-spew-300-billion-more-tons-of-carbon-dioxide-during-use
Jason
Box knows ice. That’s why what’s happened this year concerns him
so
much.
Box
just returned from a trip to Greenland. Right now, the ice there is …
black:.
Photo by Jason Box
Photo by Jason Box
Photo by Jason Box
Photo by Jason Box
Photo by Jason Box
Photo by Jason Box
The
ice in Greenland this year isn’t just a little dark—it’s
record-setting dark. Box says he’s never seen anything like it. I
spoke to Box by phone earlier this month, just days after he returned
from his summer field research campaign.
“I
was just stunned, really,” Box told me.
The
photos he took this summer in Greenland are frightening. But their
implications are even more so. Just like black cars are hotter to the
touch than white ones on sunny summer days, dark ice melts much more
quickly.
As
a member of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Box
travels to Greenland from his home in Copenhagen to track down the
source of the soot that’s speeding up the glaciers’
disappearance. He aptly calls his crowdfunded scientific survey Dark
Snow.
Courtesy of The National Snow and Ice Data Center
There
are several potential explanations for what’s going on here. The
most likely is that some combination of increasingly infrequent
summer snowstorms, wind-blown dust, microbial activity, and forest
fire soot led to this year’s exceptionally dark ice. A more ominous
possibility is that what we’re seeing is the start of a cascading
feedback loop tied to global warming. Box mentions this
summer’s mysterious
Siberian holes and offshore
methane bubbles as evidence
that the Arctic can quickly change in unpredictable ways.
This
year, Greenland’s ice sheet was the darkest Box (or anyone else)
has ever measured. Box gives the stunning stats: “In 2014 the ice
sheet is precisely 5.6 percent darker, producing an
additional absorption of energy equivalent with roughly twice
the US annual electricity consumption.”
Perhaps
coincidentally, 2014 will also be the year with the highest number of
forest fires ever measured in Arctic.
Box
ran these numbers exclusively for Slate,
and what he found shocked him. Since comprehensive satellite
measurements began in 2000, never before have Arctic wildfires been
as powerful as this year. In fact, over the last two or three years,
Box calculated that Arctic fires have been burning at a rate that’s
double that of just a decade ago. Box felt this finding was so
important that he didn’t want to wait for peer review, and instead
decided to publish first on Slate.
He’s planning on submitting these and other recent findings to a
formal scientific journal later this year.
Photo by Jason Box/NASA
Box’s
findings are in line with recent research that shows the Arctic is in
the midst of dramatic change.
A
recent study has found that, as the Arctic warms, forests there are
turning to flame at rates unprecedented
in the last 10,000 years.
This year, those fires produced volumes of smoke and soot that Box
says drifted
over to Greenland.
In
total, more than 3.3
million hectares burned
in Canada’s Northwest Territories alone this year—nearly 9 times
the long term average—resulting in a charred area bigger than the
states of Connecticut and Massachusetts combined. That figure
includes the massive Birch Creek Complex, which could end up being
the biggest
wildfire in
modern Canadian history. In July, it spread a smoke plume all the way
to Portugal.
In an
interview with
Canada’s National
Post earlier
this year, NASA scientist Douglas Morton said, “It’s a major
event in the life of the earth system to have a huge set of fires
like what you are seeing in Western Canada.”
Box
says the real challenge is to rank what fraction of the soot he finds
on the Greenland ice is from forest fires, and what is from other
sources, like factories. Box says the decline of snow cover in other
parts of the Arctic (like Canada) is also exposing more dirt to the
air, which can then be more easily transported by the wind.
Regardless of their ultimate darkening effect on Greenland, this
year’s vast Arctic fires have become a major new source of
greenhouse gas emissions from the thawing Arctic. Last year, NASA
scientists found “amazing”
levels of carbon dioxide and methane emanating from Alaskan
permafrost.
If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd.
That
tweet landed Box in a bit of hot water with his department, which he
said now has to approve his media appearances. Still, Box’s
sentiment is inspiring millions. His “f’d” quote is serving as
the centerpiece of a massive
petition (with nearly 2
million signatures at last count) that the activist organization
Avaaz will deliver to “national, local, and international leaders”
at this month’s global warming rally in New York City on Sept. 21.
Greenhouse
gas emissions
rise at fastest rate for 30
years
Rise
in CO2 concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere causes meteorologists
to warn ‘world out of time
9
September, 2014
Surging
carbon dioxide levels have pushed greenhouse gases to record highs in
the atmosphere, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has said.
Concentrations
of carbon dioxide, the major cause of global warming, increased at
their fastest rate for 30 years in 2013, despite warnings from the
world’s scientists of the need to cut emissions to halt temperature
rises.
Experts
warned that the world was “running out of time” to reverse rising
levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) to tackle climate change.
Data
show levels of the gas increased more between 2012 and 2013 than
during any other year since 1984, possibly due to less uptake of
carbon dioxide by ecosystems such as forests, as well as rising CO2
emissions.
The
annual greenhouse gas bulletin from the WMO showed that in 2013
concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere were 142% of what they were
before the Industrial Revolution.
Other
potent greenhouse gases have also risen significantly, with
concentrations of methane now 253% and nitrous oxide 121% of
pre-industrial levels.
Between
1990 and 2013 the warming effect on the planet known as “radiative
forcing” due to greenhouse gases such as CO2 rose by more than a
third (34%).
The
bulletin reveals concentrations of gases in the atmosphere, not
emissions – around quarter of which are absorbed by the oceans and
a further quarter by ecosystems.
Oceans
cushion the increases in carbon dioxide that would otherwise be seen
in the atmosphere – but at a cost, with the world’s seas becoming
more acidic at a rate not seen for at least 300m years, the WMO said.
WMO
secretary-general Michel Jarraud said: “We know without any doubt
that our climate is changing and our weather is becoming more extreme
due to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels.
“The
greenhouse gas bulletin shows that, far from falling, the
concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere actually increased
last year at the fastest rate for nearly 30 years.
“We
must reverse this trend by cutting emissions of CO2 and other
greenhouse gases across the board. We are running out of time.
“Carbon
dioxide remains in the atmosphere for many hundreds of years and in
the ocean for even longer. Past, present and future CO2 emissions
will have a cumulative impact on both global warming and ocean
acidification. The laws of physics are non-negotiable.”
Carbon
dioxide is responsible for four-fifths of the increase in warming by
greenhouse gases, with concentrations in the atmosphere averaging 396
parts per million (ppm) in 2013.
Last
year levels increased by 2.9ppm – the largest annual increase seen
from 1984 to 2013.
At
current rates, annual concentrations will pass the symbolic 400ppm in
2015 or 2016, the WMO said, although that level has already been
reached over shorter periods than a year as CO2 levels fluctuate
seasonally and regionally.
For
the first time, the WMO bulletin includes a section on ocean
acidification, caused by the uptake of carbon dioxide into the seas,
which can harm the ability of wildlife such as corals, molluscs and
some plankton to form shells.
It
could also reduce survival, hit development and growth rates and
effect physiological functions in wildlife.
Prof
Joanna Haigh, co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate
Change and Environment, Imperial College London, said: “Far from a
slowdown, the concentration is rising faster than ever – with an
inevitable impact on future global temperatures... steps need to be
taken now to reduce CO2 emissions.”
Prof
Dave Reay, chair in carbon management at the University of Edinburgh,
said: “This is the litmus test when it comes to our efforts to
reduce emissions and on this evidence we are failing. Of particular
concern is the indication that carbon storage in the world’s
forests and oceans may be faltering.
“So
far these ‘carbon sinks’ have been locking away almost half of
all the carbon dioxide we emit. If they begin to fail in the face of
further warming then our chances of avoiding dangerous climate change
become very slim indeed.”
Why
We Should Be Paying
More Attention to Methane
WCAI,
10
September, 2014
Methane.
It's the other greenhouse gas - less common and shorter-lived than
carbon dioxide, but also a much more potent heat trapper.
If
there's one chemical formula most Americans recognize, it's probably
CO2. Carbon dioxide. The molecule now thought to be primarily
responsible for human-caused climate change.
But
carbon dioxide has a much less famous cousin that could also wreak
havoc on the climate. Substitute four hydrogens for those two oxygen
atoms and you've got methane, CH4, a major component in natural gas.
Methane
is the most compact and efficient form of carbon-based fuel, leading
to lower carbon emissions than oil or coal when it's burned. That's
why people as disparate as President Obama and the billionaire Koch
brothers have declared natural gas a critical part of reducing
greenhouse gas emissions from electricity production.
There's
a down side to methane's simple chemisty, though. It is much more
efficient - at least 20 times more - than carbon dioxide at trapping
heat in the atmosphere. Methane, itself, only lasts about ten years
in the atmosphere, but it breaks down to carbon dioxide, which can
stick around for hundreds of years. So, while methane currently makes
up less than ten percent of American greenhouse gas emissions, it has
a disproportionate impact in terms of warming.
"There's
so much we don't know about methane, and it's potential impact is
pretty significant."
-
Jeff Seewald, WHOI
Just
where does all that methane come from? The Environmental Protection
Agency’s most recent Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and
Sinks lists natural gas and petroleum production as the largest
source, followed by livestock (think flatulence) and landfills. In
all, human activities directly account for more than sixty percent of
the methane entering the atmosphere.
Methane,
CH4, traps at least twenty times as much heat as carbon dioxide
The
remainder comes from natural sources. Methane is produced by bacteria
in places where there’s abundant food (a.k.a. carbon, usually from
dead plants or animals) but no oxygen. The mud under wetlands and
beneath the seafloor are two examples.
But
the line between natural and human-caused methane emissions is
becoming fuzzy, according to Sue Natali, an assistant scientist at
Woods Hole Research Center.
Natali
is particularly concerned about the prospect of large quantities of
methane being released from Arctic permafrost as it thaws, due to
human-caused climate change. Under current emissions scenarios,
scientists expect half of surface permafrost to thaw this century.
That
previously permanently frozen soil is extremely carbon-rich. It’s
estimated to hold between 1,400 and 1,700 gigatons of carbon –
nearly twice as much as is currently found in the atmosphere. Some of
that is in the form of methane that could be released as permafrost
thaws.
The
bigger concern, though, is that rising temperatures will enable
methane-producing bacteria to ramp up, and all that carbon will
provide ample food. That could lead to an enormous infusion of
methane into the atmosphere, which would intensify warming, which
would lead to more thawing, which would … you get the idea.
Methane,
CH4, traps at least twenty times as much heat as carbon dioxide.
“Scientists
use the term positive feedback,” says Natali, “We mean positive,
not that it’s good, but that it’s an amplification of climate
warming.”
The
recent discovery of three large craters in Siberia that appear to
have been caused by a build-up of methane in thawing permafrost has
raised the specter of impacts completely unforeseen by scientists.
There’s
also been concern that the amount of methane seeping out of the
seafloor is increasing due to warming. One climate scientist
responded notably to an announcement by Stokholm University
scientists that they were finding unexpectedly high levels of methane
bubbling up from the seafloor:
“If
even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the
atmosphere, we’re f’d,” Jason Box tweeted.
But
Carolyn Ruppel, head of the Gas Hydrates Program at the U.S.G.S.,
says this could be a false alarm. Her group recently documented
hundreds of methane seeps off the east coast of the U.S. Based on
their findings, Ruppel says that there could be thousands more
methane seeps that we haven’t discovered yet – not because
they’re new; we just haven’t looked before.
That’s
not to say that rising temperatures couldn’t increase the amount of
methane coming from the sea floor. Warmer waters could thaw frozen
pools of methane and increase bacterial production, as well. But
Ruppel says most of that would be absorbed by the water before it had
a chance reach the surface. To back that up, she points to studies
that have found no increase in atmospheric methane levels above
locations where methane is bubbling up from the sea floor.
Still,
Ruppel says methane deserves more attention than it’s been getting.
Natali and Jeff Seewald, a senior scientist in the Department of
Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry at Woods Hole Oceanographic
Instituion, agree.
"There's
so much we don't know about methane and it's potential impact is
pretty significant," says Seewald. "Considering it's
potential, I think it does deserve significant attention."
Listen to podcast HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.